To be invited to give this lecture in memory of George Ernest Morrison, that remarkable Australian, is not only a pleasure and an honour; it provides a very appropriate occasion to review the unique position China has held for more than three centuries in the eyes of French intellectuals. Morrison, himself quite fluent in French and well versed in French literature, was very familiar with some distinguished members of the French intelligentsia who visited China during those ‘Morrison years', such as Loti, Segalen and Claudel. He also knew well how prestigious China had been in the eyes of French intellectuals of an earlier period, namely French Jesuits and French Philosophes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Their writings occupy a distinctive position on the shelves of Morrison's own library, once in Peking and later transferred to Japan. These early French books with their old-fashioned print and leather binding indicated, and Morrison was fully aware of it, that a major intellectual encounter had taken place between France and China. For the Philosophes, for Voltaire, Diderot and other contributors to the Great Encyclopedia, China was a powerful war machine which they directed against the backwardness, the tyranny, the impotence of the Versailles monarchy. As seen in the very title of a well-known French Ph.D. dissertation, China played an essential role in the formation and growth of the esprit philosophique in eighteenth century France.
China, in the view of these philosophes, was an empire ruled by an intellectual elite, namely the Confucian literati. In our subsequent Western political culture, our universities being no exception, ‘mandarin' has become a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity, almost a dirty word. But such was not the case in the eighteenth century. Voltaire praised very highly the Confucian degree holders he called Talapoints, a strange word which has since vanished entirely. China was seen as being ruled by men of wisdom, and this was an obvious contrast to the practices of the French monarchy and its corrupt, incompetent, uneducated officials. China was supposed to be at least as advanced as France, on the way towards Enlightenment, towards l'Age des Lumières.
These peoples [said Diderot], gifted with a 'consentement unanime, are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, intellect, art, wisdom, policy, and in their
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To be invited to give this lecture in memory of George Ernest Morrison, that remarkable Australian, is not only a pleasure and an honour; it provides a very appropriate occasion to review the unique position China has held for more than three centuries in the eyes of French intellectuals, Morrison, himself quite fluent in French and well versed in French literature, was very familiar with some distinguished members of the French intelligentsia who visited China during those ‘Morrison years', such as Loti, Segalen and Claudel. He also knew well how prestigious China had been in the eyes of French intellectuals of an earlier period, namely French Jesuits and French Philosophes of the late seven- teenth and eighteenth century. Their writings occupy a distinctive position on the shelves of Morrison's own library, once in Peking and later transferred to Japan. These early French books with their old-fashioned print and leather binding indicated, and Morrison was fully aware of it, that a major intellectual encounter had taken place between France and China. For the Philosophes, for Vol- taire, Diderot and other contributors to the Great Encyclopedia, China was a powerful war machine which they directed against the backwardness, the tyranny, the impotence of the Versailles mon- archy. As seen in the very title of a well-known French Ph.D. dissertation, China played an essential role in the formation and growth of the esprit philosophique in eighteenth century France."
China, in the view of these philosophes, was an empire ruled by an intellectual elite, namely the Confucian literati. In our subse- quent Western political culture, our universities being no excep- tion, ‘mandarin' has become a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity, almost a dirty word. But such was not the case in the eighteenth century. Voltaire praised very highly the Confucian degree holders he called Talapoints a strange word which has since vanished entirely. China was seen as being ruled by men of wisdom, and this was an obvious contrast to the practices of the French monarchy and its corrupt, incompetent, uneducated officials. China was sup- posed to be at least as advanced as France, on the way towards Enlightenment, towards l'Age des Lumières.
These peoples [said Diderot], gifted with a 'consent- iment unanime, are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, intellect, art, wisdom, policy, and in their
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